The Sound of Listening

The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can performfrom providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to imagining and building a more just and peaceful world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of writing on poetry after his Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007), Philip Metres widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of neglected poetries (the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, peace poetry); personal explorations of singular poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate the poets practice of listening in Sand Opera.